Elections and Political Participation - lecture notes
Michał Pierzgalski
This version: November 18, 2018 (This document is a work in progress)
Lecture 1: Preliminaries - Democracy and elections
Introductory question
What is the most fundamental feature/principle of democracy?
Normative and positive statements
In science, statements are broken into two main categories:
Normative and positive statements (2)
Positive political science is the branch of political science that concerns the description and explanation of political phenomena.
- A positive statement is objective and therefore can be scientifically tested for legitimacy based on available evidence. An example is, "Decreasing labor costs lead to a decrease in unemployment".
- A normative statement is opinion-based and subjective. An example of this: "Tax rates are unfair."
Normative and positive statements (3)
- In contrast to positive statements, normative statements are primarily philosophical and we can make value judgments about these statements.
- Normative statements make claims about how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, and which actions are right or wrong.
Normative and positive statements (4)
Positive statements are either true or false. Before we check whether or not positive statement is true, we call it a hypothesis.
When a hypothesis is positively tested we can say that statement is a theorem or corollary.
Democracy - normative and positive definitions
- The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will;
- The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.
– (Schumpeter, 1976)
Democracy
- Democracy is a system in which political parties lose elections (Przeworski, 1991).
Elections
Election is simply a choice. To elect means “to choose or make a decision”.
- An election is a formal decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 18/19th century (e.g. USA). Elections may fill offices in the legislature, in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government.
- Sometimes other forms of voting such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
Partisan and non-partisan elections
- Nonpartisan elections - candidate is eligible based on her or his own merits rather than as a member of a political party. No political affiliation is shown on the ballot next to a candidate.
- Nonpartisan elections are common e.g.: 1) in the election of judges (e.g. in the U.S.), or 2) for local government offices such as: municipal and county offices.
- In some nonpartisan elections, it is common knowledge which candidates are backed by which parties; in others, parties are uninvolved and voters make choices with no regard to partisan considerations.
IOWA judges selection: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8nrcissdbhym9df/JNP_KnowYourCourts_2015.pdf?dl=0
Direct and representative democracy
- Direct democracy - e.g. Athens in 6th century BC (Cleisthenes democratic constitution);
- Representative democracy - modern form of democratic government (e.g. Spain, Poland).
Athenian democracy
- Athenian democracy took the form of a direct democracy, and it had two distinguishing features: the random selection of ordinary citizens to fill the few existing government administrative and judicial offices (sortition), and a legislative assembly consisting of all Athenian citizens.
- All eligible citizens were allowed to speak and vote in the assembly, which set the laws of the city state. However, Athenian citizenship excluded women, slaves, foreigners, non-landowners, and men under 20 years of age.
Athenian democracy (2)
The Ekklesia (People’s Assembly) became the legislative body of Athens. It was the general meeting of all citizens — males of Athenian origin over the age of 20.
With a few exceptions, all appointments in Athens were made by lot or by rotation to equalize everyone’s opportunity to hold office.
City-state and nation state
A city-state:
- smaller than a “nation” in the sense of “large sovereign country” and
- may or may not be dominated by all or part of a single “nation” in the sense of a common ethnicity.
A nation state (or nation-state):
- is a country where a distinct cultural or ethnic group (a “nation” or “people”) inhabits a territory and has formed a state (often a sovereign state) that it predominantly governs; It is a more precise concept than “country”, since a country need not have a predominant ethnic group.
Representative democracy
- In the course of the nineteenth century, the nation-state displaced the city-state as the appropriate unit for democracy.
- The institutional innovation that made it possible to extend the bounds of a republic was representation: an innovation that democrats like Madison or Jefferson regarded as one of the most profound political inventions of all time.
Representative democracy (2)
Constitutional Convention of 1787 (USA) - created a constitution for the first of the large representative democracies. By 1787, the population of the United States was already greater than that of all of Ancient Greece.
By the middle-and certainly by the end-of the nineteenth century the idea of democracy in the city-state had been entirely displaced by the idea of representative democracy in the nation-state.
Robert Dahl on “realistic” democracy (polyarchy)
Main features:
- elected officials,
- free, frequent and fair elections,
- freedom of expression,
- access to alternative sources of information,
- associational autonomy.
Larry Diamond on representative democracy
Main features:
- a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections;
- the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life;
- protection of the human rights of all citizens;
- a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.
Samuel Huntington on democratic government
“… a twentieth-century political system … [is democratic] … to the extent that its most powerful collective decision makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote.”
“Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities may make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic. Democracy is one public virtue, not the only one …”.
Democracy and republic
- The term republic today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state.
- James Wilson - “a republican or democratic” government - “the people at large retain the supreme power”.
- Today’s modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman Republic than the Greek models because it was a state in which:
- supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, and
- had an elected or nominated leader.
Democracy and republic (2)
According to Montesquieu:
[R]epublican government is that in which the body, or only a part of the people, is posessed of the supreme power,
… and thus may be either a democratic or an aristocratic republic.
- In other words, republic is the main category of government in which authority rests initially with the populace, but is composed of two subcategories, the democratic if all the people rule or the aristocratic if only a select number of them do.
- Before the establishment of the universal suffrage (XXth century), only a minority of people were citizens with votes in elections for representatives.
Democracy and republic (3)
As for the republican form of government, some emphasize “rule of law”: John Adams described a republic as
- an Empire of Laws, and not of Men, or as a government in which all men of all classes and interests are equally subject to the laws.
Principles of Free Elections
The election is considered to be ‘general’ because all citizens have the right to vote - regardless of gender, income, religion, profession or political beliefs. They usually must, however, be aged 18 or over on election day.
The election is ‘secret’ - a voter’s choices in an election or a referendum are both secret and anonymous.
The election is ‘direct’ because the voters elect without an intermediate body.
The election is ‘free’ because citizens may not be influenced or put under pressure regarding their decision on whom to support.
The election is ‘equal’ because each voter is allowed to cast the same numbers of votes.
In fact, it is not usually true that every vote carries the same weight. We will discuss this important issue later.
The growth of universal suffrage in UK
\[**1265**\]
Parliament established. It contains 2 chambers. One is ‘the Lords’ - unelected aristocrats. The other is ‘the Commons’. These Members of Parliament (MPs) are smaller landowners and are elected only by male landowners.
\[**1832**\]
Great Reform Act. Before this time only landowners could vote for MPs to sit in the House of Commons. This meant 1 in 7 men could vote. (440,000 people) After 1832 the male urban middle classes gain the vote, and so the electorate increases to 1 in 5 men (650,000 people). (...)
… The growth of universal suffrage in UK
\[**1867**\]
Second Reform Act. This extends the vote to the skilled urban male working class. The electorate increases to 1 in 3 men.
\[**1884**\]
Third Reform Act. The vote is now given to working class men in the countryside. The electorate is now 2 out of 3 men.
\[**1918**\]
Representation of the People Act. Almost all men over 21 years old, and women over 30 years old now have the vote.
\[**1928**\]
Effectively all women and men over 21 now have the right to vote.
Electoral fraud
What prevents election from being fair and free?
Electoral fraud (2)
The electorate may be poorly informed about issues or candidates due to lack of freedom of the press, lack of objectivity in the press due to state or corporate control, or lack of access to news and political media.
Freedom of speech may be limited by the state, favoring certain viewpoints or state propaganda.
Electoral fraud (3)
Electoral fraud involve e.g. manipulating electoral districts boundaries, exclusion of opposition candidates from eligibility for office, and manipulating thresholds, those in power may arrest or assassinate candidates, outlaw competitors, harass or beat campaign workers, or intimidate voters with violence, tampering with the election mechanism, confusing or misleading voters about how to vote, violation of the secret ballot, tampering with voting machines, destruction of legitimately cast ballots, voter suppression, voter registration fraud, failure to validate voter residency, fraudulent tabulation of results, use of physical force or verbal intimation at polling places, persuading candidates into not standing against them, blackmailing, bribery, carousel voting etc.
Electoral fraud (4)
Carousel voting is a method of vote rigging in elections, used e.g. in Russia and Ukraine. Voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times. The term "carousel" refers to the circular movement made by the voters, from one polling station to the next, and so on.
Lecture 2: Electoral systems - methods of selection of partisan (political) and nonpartisan officials (part 1)
Collective decisions
Voting is a way to make collective decisions, that is, decisions that are made by a group. There are also other methods to make group decisions - e.g. consensus, random process, sortition, contest.
Consensus
Consensus is a process for group decision-making. It is a method by which an entire group of people can come to an agreement. The input and ideas of all participants are gathered and synthesized to arrive at a final decision acceptable to all.
- In order to reach consensus, it is not necessary that everyone expresses their will or opinion. The distribution of preferences remains unknown.
- But what is the decision rule, then?
- The decision-rule is that no one disagrees. To be more precise: consensus means that no one expresses dissent.
Collective decisions (2)
Consensus may not be efficient way to make decisions when the group of people who try to select the best option is very large. Consensus may take much more time than voting.
Collective decisions (3)
In voting, everyone expresses their will/opinion (in the form of a vote), which means that voting produces certainty regarding the distribution of preferences. The decision rule is applied to this distribution to determine the collective decision.
For example, in the case of a simple majority vote, the option with the most votes becomes the collective decision.
There are many different methods of selecting using a vote - we discuss some of them in this course.
Voting
Voting has been used as a feature of democracy since the 6th century BC, when democracy was introduced by the Athenians.
However, in Athenian democracy, voting was seen as the least democratic among methods used for selecting public officials, and was little used, because elections were believed to inherently favor the wealthy and well-known over average citizens.
Assemblies open to all citizens, and selection by lot (known as sortition), as well as rotation of office seems to be more democratic for Athenians.
Sortition
Sortition (also known as allotment or the drawing of lots) is the selection of decision makers by lottery. The decision-makers are chosen as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the primary method for appointing officials, and its use was widely regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.
Voting (2)
One of the earliest recorded elections in Athens was a plurality vote that it was undesirable to "win": in the process called ostracism, voters chose the citizen they most wanted to exile for ten years.
Most elections in the early history of democracy were held using plurality voting or some variant, but as an exception, the state of Venice in the 13th century adopted the system we now know as approval voting to elect their Great Council.
Voting system
Free and fair elections are a central feature of, and a neccesery condition for, representative democracy.
An electoral system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined.
- Electoral systems consist of sets of rules that govern all aspects of the voting process: e.g. how ballots are marked and cast, how do the ballot papers look, how the ballots are counted (voting method), what are magnitudes of voting districtis, are there any formal electoral thresholds of representation used in elections, etc.
Social choice theory
The study of formally defined voting systems is called social choice theory or voting theory, a subfield of political science, economics and mathematics.
Social choice theory is concerned with the study of group decision making processes.
Voting system (2)
A voting system or electoral system is a winner-selection method by which voters make a choice between options, often in an election or on a policy referendum.
In the broad sense of the term, the electoral system is a set of laws that regulate electoral competition between candidates or parties or both.
Voting system (3)
Electoral system comprises three essential elements, namely:
- electoral formula, i.e. the method that is used for the translation of vote totals into representative seats in the parliament;
- electoral district magnitude, i.e. the total number of seats given to each district or constituency; It is a territorial subdivision (area) for electing members to e.g. a legislative body - votes are counted and transformed into seats at the electoral district level. Each electoral district is assigned a specific number of seats according to its population (or voting-age population). There are multi-member districts (MMD) or single-member districts (SMD);
- ballot type, i.e. how voters (constituents) cast their votes?, what does a ballot paper look like?
- [an optional element] formal (legal) threshold of representation (not to be confused with the so-called natural threshold).
Voting system (4)
Electoral formula is the most important element of a voting system and usually the name of the electoral system is derived from the name of electoral formula.
Voting system - ballot types
We can distinguish two types of ballots - categorical (voters are allowed to choose only one candidate or party) and preferential (voters can rank each candidate in order of preference).
In some voting systems voters are eligible to use both categorical and preferential vote, e.g. voters choose between parties (categorical) and then rank candidates on the chosen party list.
Social choice theory
The study of formally defined voting systems is called social choice theory or voting theory, a subfield of political science, economics and mathematics.
Social choice theory is concerned with the study of group decision making processes.